Posted by: nacho

RE: Roman Empire... Everything is truncated now, though? What use to take 150 years may only take thirty.

And my point was about the environment in which we find ourselves. Moral checks an balances are failing. (Roy Moore.) Truth is negotiable. (Everything Trump says.) Resistance isn't being couched in "fight the Man" terms, but rather more "let's save what we can." I don't think there will be a big kablooie at all, but rather a slow shift into something new that will barrel into a new reality with a crazy intense (but tiny) conflict at the end as the old whites dues (which at that point will be you and me) try desperately to hang on to what was. (Get me drunk and start me ranting. I almost embarrassed myself at an X-Mas party a few weeks ago.)

RE: Capaldi's speech... Even better that he wrote it.

The timelines don't matter. We're actually making the same point, you're just incorrectly attributing it to the fall of the Empire versus the fall of the Republic. Those are two distinctive entities with two distinctive demises. So, for about 15 years now, I've just wanted you to use the right terms!

Posted by: RottingCorpse

RE: Roman Empire... Everything is truncated now, though? What use to take 150 years may only take thirty.

And my point was about the environment in which we find ourselves. Moral checks an balances are failing. (Roy Moore.) Truth is negotiable. (Everything Trump says.) Resistance isn't being couched in "fight the Man" terms, but rather more "let's save what we can." I don't think there will be a big kablooie at all, but rather a slow shift into something new that will barrel into a new reality with a crazy intense (but tiny) conflict at the end as the old whites dues (which at that point will be you and me) try desperately to hang on to what was. (Get me drunk and start me ranting. I almost embarrassed myself at an X-Mas party a few weeks ago.)

Posted by: nacho

Having watched the regeneration scene about times, I just want to reiterate: I am 100% a Jodie Whitaker man. She's beautiful, tough, awesome, compelling, and intriguing in just 10 seconds of actual face time. There's a power around her that just feels wonderful. Oh, Brilliant (heavy northern accent) indeed!

Posted by: nacho

The Roman Empire's fall is something that no one would have noticed. It was a subtle shift that took hundreds (and, in some cases, almost 2000) years. The Republic fell in one generation (Pompey would tell you it fell in one hour). The Empire fell across ten generations.

Posted by: nacho

No to to derail your Who thread, but haven't we talked about the Fall of the Roman Empire in these terms? If a civilization accepts any behavior from it's rulers in order to keep that ruler in power, then the government will eat itself.

I don't think I've been drunk enough around you to give you my big "paradigm shift" rant, but remind me. The essence of it is that we're doomed because maybe it's better for the universe that we're doomed.

I tell you this once every year. We aren't yet in Roman Empire country. Our Christmas day party conversation was how Trump is basically Sulla, hook, line, sinker. Mirror image. That's 100 years before the fall of the Republic. The ominous comment is: Who will be our Caesar?

The Roman Empire lasted from around 80 AD to 1452. More than 1300 years. It collapsed because of the things Trump (Also Sulla) feared: Out of control immigration, economic diffusion, and the old "You can't actually control 80% of the known world in the way you think you can, buddy" problem.

The Republic -- which America is based on, by the way -- took 150 years to collapse. The collapse of the Roman Republic mirrors the collapse of the American Republic in a way that's almost eerie.

2) Out of control cultural/socio-economic debates at the grassroots level that led to people briefly rising up to start radical splinter parties that were based either on religion or "Our lives matter too" movements.

3) Splinter groups giving enough power in the system to allow for the rise of demagogues who grandstanded and waved swords and won over the popular opinion based on looks/power/their ability to control the media.

Should I stop now? Because we're still 100 years away from Caesar and Pompey and Crassus... But I can continue and even tie modern personalities in with Roman personalities who all did the EXACT SAME THING almost word for word in their political campaigns...

Posted by: RottingCorpse

No to to derail your Who thread, but haven't we talked about the Fall of the Roman Empire in these terms? If a civilization accepts any behavior from it's rulers in order to keep that ruler in power, then the government will eat itself.

I don't think I've been drunk enough around you to give you my big "paradigm shift" rant, but remind me. The essence of it is that we're doomed because maybe it's better for the universe that we're doomed.

Posted by: nacho

I liked the Capaldi speech at the end. I felt like he was speaking the audience instead the "new" Doctor. Both in terms of where the world is now and in a "Why don'y you give this Lady Doctor a chance, eh?"

Similar to the whole "we'll defeat them by loving each other" message in TLJ, eh? It's a shame that the only means left to condemn Trumpism is by derailing our escapist high fantasy narratives.

Posted by: RottingCorpse

I liked the Capaldi speech at the end. I felt like he was speaking the audience instead the "new" Doctor. Both in terms of where the world is now and in a "Why don'y you give this Lady Doctor a chance, eh?"

Posted by: nacho

The Christmas episode was, by far, one of the strangest in NuWho...and also indicative of all of the problems of the Moffatt era. It was steeped in nostalgia and fan service but didn't really understand the nature of that nostalgia, or the reason for the fan service. It revisited the troubling sexism that runs through NuWho and tweaked the characters in a direction that, for normal people in 2017, is offensive and baffling.

But then it also kind of kicked out the grandiose storytelling that has marked episodes like this in the past.

David Bradley is, sadly, underused and abused as the First Doctor. The episode handles the flashback so well -- giving us original scenes from The Tenth Planet and morphing into Bradley and (all too briefly) the new Ben and Polly. It ends with the old black and white refeneration sequence, against shifting back and forth between Bradley and actual footage. All very lovely.

But it fails to remember that (a) The First Doctor willing went into his regeneration and (b) he whole "I don't want to go" thing is a contrivance of the Moffatt Era. The Doctor has always gracefully accepted regeneration (except for the Second Doctor). Drawing out a regeneration for an entire episode, once again, is exhausting. David Tennant spent an entire year regenerating, and Matt Smith speechifying his way to a blink-and-done regeneration was tedious. Capaldi gets the same outgo. He spends the whole episode fighting off the regeneration, he gets a long-winded monologue at the end, we get a visit from fucking Clara.

Meanwhile, Bradley's First Doctor is in the same boat. And for all the nostalgia, it's as if no one involved in this episode ever actually watched Hartnell's Doctor. Bradley's overt sexism is meant to be a ha-ha nod at the 60's culture, but, seriously, let's leave that to Austin Powers, okay? Being a woman in Hartnell's TARDIS did mean lots of screaming, damsel-in-distress stuff, but it was also pioneering in terms of equality. The companions that followed the first trio represented the burgeoning feminism of the time. Despite the awkward all-male world, we saw companions emerge in 60's and 70's Who that were generals willing to sacrifice themselves, individualistic career women, computer geniuses who were specifically written to make the male companion look like a dunce,and so on. To have Bradley's version of the First Doctor think female companions are nothing more than house cleaners was strange and out of character. To take a companion whose stated purpose was to bring gender and color diversity to the show and then awkwardly mock her gender and sexual orientation through a 60's lens was an insulting and shocking misstep. To then take that one step further and imply a sexual connotation to the First Doctor's comments to Bill was almost beyond the pale in a show that has been, for seven years, two steps forward and three step back in terms of diversity.

The daring element of the episode is also what drags it down. There's no bad guy. No nefarious plot. Everything's okay, everyone lives somewhat happily ever after. The Doctor gets a win. New aliens are introduced, with comically bad special effects, whose sole purpose is to image the memories of the dying in the moment before their death. These are used for entirely pleasant and happy purposes. What should have been an interesting twist that turned the tropes of the show on its ear turned out to be a sitzkrieg. The Doctors won't want to die. The First because he's scared. The Twelfth...because...he's tired? We don't really get any details glimpse into why, which is odd and sort of removes us from the story. Bill is just a construct, essentially filling the shoes of not-Rose in Day of the Doctor. She's a guide, but the fact that her species is new, her purposes unclear, and the ultimate explanation is that she's just a recording device sort of ruins that.

We end up with a placeholder episode that's literally frozen in time, with some good supporting stuff from Gatiss, a misuse of Bradley, and an overwrought yet oddly diffused swan song from Capaldi.

Then we get 80 seconds of Whittaker...and those 80 seconds and two words are the best thing about this episode and, perhaps, the best thing to emerge from NuWho in years.